Wednesday, May 31, 2017

"Sony will cut costs, raise production yields for new offerings and increase sales of image sensors used in automobiles. The moves aim to shield the semiconductor business from highly volatile smartphone demand.

Sony holds the leading global market share of nearly 50% in value terms for image sensors, Techno Systems Research says. But competition from No. 2 Samsung Electronics and others is growing."

TSR appears to be quite optimistic in its estimation of Sony share. Other analysts give Sony "only" 35-40% of the market.

Phys.org, ICFO: Barcelona, Spain-based Institute of Photonic Sciences in collaboration with the company Graphenea develops "a high-resolution image sensor consisting of hundreds of thousands of photodetectors based on graphene and quantum dots (QD). They operated it as a digital camera that is highly sensitive to UV, visible and infrared light at the same time. This has never been achieved before with existing imaging sensors."

AutoSens publishes Detroit post-event write up. The event started with IEEE Automotive System Image Quality – P2020 standard session and continued with other automotive application-specific workshops and presentations. The scope of the P2020 standard is in one of the previous presentations:

"The significant optical and size benefits of using a curved focal surface for imaging systems have been well studied yet never brought to market for lack of a high-quality, mass-producible, curved image sensor. In this work we demonstrate that commercial silicon CMOS image sensors can be thinned and formed into accurate, highly curved optical surfaces with undiminished functionality.

We demonstrate these curved sensors in prototype cameras with custom lenses, measuring exceptional resolution of 3220 line-widths per picture height at an aperture of f/1.2 and nearly 100% relative illumination across the field. Though we use a 1/2.3” format image sensor in this report, we also show this process is generally compatible with many state of the art imaging sensor formats. By example, we report photogrammetry test data for an APS-C sized silicon die formed to a 30° subtended spherical angle. These gains in sharpness and relative illumination enable a new generation of ultra-high performance, manufacturable, digital imaging systems for scientific, industrial, and artistic use."

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Albert Theuwissen publishes his review from International Image Sensor Workshop 2017 being held these days in Hiroshima, Japan. Day one part talks about Sony stacking progress, TSMC-Qualcomm vision sensor project, Omnivision re-igniting pixel size race, and more.

David Stoppa, the head of image sensor group at FBK and renown SPAD expert, has left FBK and joined AMS-Heptagon. Now, Heptagon gets a lot of knowledge and expertise in direct ToF sensors, in addition to the indirect one that it acquired with MESA Imaging few years ago.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Backchannel, RoadToVR: The secretive AR startup Magic Leap is in the process of raising D round money at the company valuation of $6–8 billion, reportedly. Chinese Alibaba is said to be leading the new funding round.

Just 15 months ago, Magic Leap raised $793.5M, adding to the $592M it had previously raised and earning a valuation at $4.5 billion.

"...solution is to use silicon germanium in place of elemental silicon for the semiconductor layer. Silicon germanium has a lower bandgap than elemental silicon, such that it is better for the absorption of infrared radiation. However, silicon germanium has poor compatibility with CMOS processes for the logic devices due to increased leakage current. As such, manufacturing the logic devices on silicon germanium introduces difficulties and adds cost to the manufacture of the CMOS image sensors.

The present application is directed to a CMOS image sensor with elemental silicon and silicon germanium for long-wavelength pixel sensors. In some embodiments, an elemental silicon layer abuts a silicon germanium layer. A photodetector is at least partially buried in the silicon germanium layer and a transistor is arranged on a surface of the elemental silicon layer with a source/drain region electrically coupled to the photodetector. By arranging the photodetector in the silicon germanium layer, the photodetector advantageously has good sensitivity to and absorption of long-wavelength radiation, such as, for example, infrared radiation. Further, by arranging the transistor on the elemental silicon layer, conventional CMOS processes may advantageously be used when forming the transistor."

"...the semiconductor stack 102 comprises a silicon layer 104 and a silicon germanium layer 106. In some embodiments, the silicon germanium layer 106 partially covers an upper surface 108 of the silicon layer 104, and/or is buried in the upper surface 108 of the silicon layer 104. In other embodiments, the silicon germanium layer 106 is partially or fully covered by the silicon layer 104. The silicon and silicon germanium layers 104, 106 may correspond to epitaxial layers and/or regions of a semiconductor substrate, and the silicon layer 104 may be, for example, elemental silicon."

"The infrared sensor component includes a substrate [110], a III-V compound layer [120] disposed on the substrate as an active pixel region, and a plurality of transistors formed on the III-V compound layer. The III-V compound layer is made of III-V groups materials, which have wide infrared wavelength coverage, large absorption coefficient in the infrared region, and high carrier mobility. Therefore, the performance of the infrared image sensor component can be improved accordingly."

Thursday, May 25, 2017

Toby Delbruck, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich presented "Silicon retina technology" at IEEE CAS Workshop at University of Pavia, Italy, on March 20-21, 2017. The human retina only sees motion, the behavior that was mimicked by Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS):

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

China Securities Research publishes a report on Q Technology, the smallest of the top-three CCM suppliers in China, said to be "on the fast track in catching up with the market leaders and has become an early mover in FPM and dual-cameral modules (DCM)." A few interesting figures from the report:

Marketwired: For more than 35 years, Teledyne DALSA has designed and manufactured what it calls the machine vision industry's best-in-class line-scan image sensors. Used in the company's line scan cameras, this class of sensors these sensors were not available as stand alone products. Now, DALSA has decided to offer them for sale, available immediately in resolutions from 2k to 16k.

Nikkei: Prof. Ken Takeuchi group at Chuo University, Japan, proposes "Value-Aware SSD" that evaluates the value of image data and stores important and not-so-important data in high- and low-reliability flash memory cells, respectively. With that, it became possible to implement high-accuracy face recognition even when the error rate is 10%, which is 12 times higher than in existing SSDs. The data retention time of SSD was improved 300 times. In addition, the read speed was improved by 26% by minimizing the time it takes to correct memory errors.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Sony has held a Corporate Strategy Meeting as a part of its IR Day discussing the business growth strategy and fiscal targets. Regarding the image sensor business, the company looks for "the image sensor for mobile use business to recover."

PRNewswire: OmniVision introduces the 1.3MP OX1A10 and 1.7MP OX2A10 for side- and rear-view camera monitoring systems (CMS), respectively. Built on 4.2um BSI split pixel technology for HDR, the new sensors offer LED flicker–reduction.

"In regular HDR cameras, the short exposure time causes the image sensor to miss the LED 'on' pulse, giving the appearance of 'flicker' in the video stream on a display. Merely increasing the exposure time of normal pixel technology to capture the LED pulse does not solve the problem, but rather causes saturation and loss of dynamic range," said Marius Evensen, product marketing manager at OmniVision. "We designed the OX1A10 and OX2A10 image sensors with LED flicker–reduction technology to specifically mitigate this problem and enable mass adoption of e-mirrors in the automotive market. These sensors join our growing portfolio of automotive specific digital imaging solutions targeted at both machine and vision display systems."

PRNewswire: OmniVision announces the OV493, a companion chip with surround-video image-processing capabilities for automotive applications. Each OV493 can process two video streams simultaneously, and two ISP companion chips can process four camera inputs for surround-view applications.

Monday, May 22, 2017

To combat distracted driving, the automotive industry is ramping up its development of driver monitoring systems and vehicle co-pilot applications, which in combination can allow the on-board computer to seize or relinquish control of the vehicle, based on the driver's state. NHTSA defines this setup as level 3 autonomy. Currently only available for luxury vehicles, these systems are expected to become a standard safety feature in the near future.

"The demand for driver monitoring systems is expected to increase significantly as more affordable technologies allow advanced semi-automated features to transition from high-end to mainstream vehicles," said Jeff Morin, automotive product marketing manager at OmniVision. "Possessing the same capability customarily found in much larger and more expensive sensors, the OV2311 aims to bring advanced driver monitoring systems to the masses by delivering high-level, cost-effective performance in a compact form factor."

PRNewswire: Softkinetic announces that BMW extended use of its ToF camera for gesture control in its Series 5 cars, in addition to the last year's Series 7.

"SoftKinetic is proud to expand our technology partnership with BMW Group to include both the BMW 7 and BMW 5 series cars," said Eric Krzeslo, CMO of SoftKinetic. "The infotainment gesture control we see in the BMW cars is just the beginning of the innovation we are bringing to the automotive market. Our technology can improve driver safety through driver assistance and monitoring and 3D vision cameras that ascertain the environment in and out of the vehicle at all times paving the way towards the fully autonomous vehicle."

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Intel keeps investing in its vision-based solution and capabilities. The recently announced Euclid Development Kit is a fully stand-alone computer integrating RealSense IR stereo depth camera, a fish eye camera, an RGB camera, an Atom x7-Z8700 Quad core CPU, microphone, GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth to produce a compact all-in-one computer and depth camera in the size of a candy bar. It comes with a 2000mAh battery so it is completely stand alone.

KoreaHerald Investor reports that CrucialTec has been granted a US patent for its in-display fingerprint solution which the company calls DFS:

“The company is talks with some global clients to commercialize the fingerprint tech in the whole area of a smartwatch screen and a certain part of a smartphone display,” a CrucialTec official said. The newly patented technology is said to feature three thin film transistors for each electrode to pick up high-resolution images, compared to one for each electrode in the existing fingerprint scanner. That configuration is said to maximize the sensing capability while maintaining high transparency level of the components.

MobileIDWorld, BiometricUpdate: In-display fingerprint sensing solutions are gathering quite a lot of attention recently. Goodix presented its solution at MWC in Barcelona this year. Synaptics and OXi Technology have been reported developing a similar technology some time ago. Apple is rumored to integrate a similar sensor in its future iPhone displays.